My favorite time of year is here: Czechtember! During the COVID-19 pandemic lockdown, I discovered The Projection Booth Podcast’s Czechtember series. Every September, host Mike White covers a Czech or Slovak film a week with two guest hosts. He occasionally also interviews the filmmakers or scholars. This is incredible enough, but even more so because he’s not afraid to cover lesser-known films that aren’t currently in print or streaming as well as newer films. People tend to focus only on the well-known Czech New Wave films, which are of course wonderful, but there are so many other interesting movies to see! I’ve learned about many films I love thanks to the podcast, and it motivates me to seek out the movies I haven’t seen just so I can listen to the episode. I still have a few Czechtember movies to watch, but I’m close to seeing them all! It’s an indispensable resource for anyone interested in Czech and Slovak film, and film in general. The podcast has over 1,000 episodes, so there’s a high probability that if you’re looking for a podcast on any particular film, it’s been covered in great depth on The Projection Booth Podcast.

I have also had the pleasure of being a guest host on the show. I really enjoy preparing for the episodes. I treat it like I’m doing an independent study course, and I try to find as many sources as I can that are in Czech so I get some language and translation practice in there as well. The first episode I was on was for Oldřich Lipský’s 1981 crazy comedy Tajemstvi hradu v Karpatech (The Mysterious Castle in the Carpathians) in 2023. The other host was Czech film scholar Jonathan L. Owen, author of Avant-Garde to New Wave: Czechoslovak Cinema, Surrealism and the Sixties and contributor to many recent boutique Blu-ray releases.

Film Trailer:

I was really happy with how the episode turned out, especially considering I was recovering from my first bout of covid. However, no matter how much I prepare and how many notes i have in front of me, there’s always something I forget to talk about. In researching for this episode, I had watched the complete collection of screenwriter Jiří Brdečka’s animated short films. They start out fairly light-hearted, but they get darker and more horrifying during the Prague Spring and Normalization periods. Meanwhile, the feature-length films he wrote during this same time period were hilarious crazy comedies. I had planned to talk about the dichotomy between these bodies of work, but I didn’t find a good time to bring it up, and then when asked at the end, “Is there anything else you’d like to talk about?” I completely blanked on it. Takový je život.

I love Brdečka’s darker short films, but it’s also sad that they were the artistic expression of his despair over the political direction the country had taken. This likely lead to poor health in his later years, and he died of a heart attack in 1982, not long after Mysterious Castle was released. Many of Brdečka’s short films are on YouTube, but I’ll share one of my favorites here, the gruesome Jsouc na řece mlynář jeden (There Was a Miller On the River) with artwork by Eva Švankmajerová.

You can listen to the Projection Booth Podcast episode on Tajemstvi hradu v Karpatech here, which also includes a nice interview with Jiří Brdečka’s daughter Tereza Brdečková and Czech film curator Irena Kovářová. The movie itself can be found online, but I highly recommend buying Deaf Crocodile’s excellent Blu-ray!

This year’s Czechtember begins with an episode on the very popular film Pelíšky (Cosy Dens). I’m excited to listen to it. I will be returning to the show as a guest host this month as well, so make sure to subscribe to The Projection Booth Podcast on your podcast app!